Server Problems Kill Stacks of HC Characters

A few hours ago a massive lag spike hit the NA servers which unfortunately killed off stacks of HC players. Whole parties have been wiped and as you can imagine the HC community is not the happiest and they’re all more than a little nervous about playing with their HC characters now.

We are now a month into the game’s release and server problems still seem to be an issue. With players investing time building up their HC characters, problems such as lag spikes need to be addressed sharpish. I know Blizzard said they won’t roll back HC characters, but when it comes to players being killed by technical issues outside of a player’s control then I think there is a good case to bend on that policy.

To the guys who were hanging out in town or checking gear when it happened, well you lucked out, and I bet you took a big sigh of relief.

Comments

and while the whole point of playing HC is to risk death, the lag monster is the lamest way to go for sure

but seriously, playing HC in the current D3 BETA1.01 is basically asking to get killed

maybe a couple years from now when they get this whole mess worked out it’ll be worth risking it (because apparently the working timeline is that since it took D2 an expansion and years of patches to be what it is, we’re supposed to give D3 the same leeway even though it’s been over a decade)

and no I didn’t lose a HC char, I’m only playing the Starter

but I am a bit bitter and cynical towards Bliz and D3 right now

here’s to hoping they rollback after this last fiasco and/or get their shit together b4 the end of the year =/

(btw this site is fantastic, thanks to everyone who helps run it, you guys really do the Diablo Community proud, unlike the Bliz forums =[)

That lag spike was real bad last night. It could easily have killed anyone in Inferno in the blink of an eye. Blizzard needs to do a better job of stabilizing their servers. They should do a roll back but they don’t because they know they can’t provide stable enough service. If this were an isolated incident, then a roll back is no problem. However, since they can’t, a roll back now would mean roll backs all the time. As a side note, I am pretty sure this is why there is no RMAH in HC. If Blizzard lets people spend real money on items for HC and they pocket cash from those transactions, then they must assure people don’t lose said items forever thanks to server instability. That would make them liable for something that has an actual cash value. They could be sued for profitting from the e-death of players.

A rollback flies in the face of hardcore. They can’t start making exceptions to the rules. If they give a rollback because of Blizzard’s server problems, then they’re going to get (more) tickets for rollbacks because of server lag or smaller spikes, for power outages, etc. Hardcore isn’t about trying not to die, it’s about dealing with the face that death is devastating. You try your hardest to never die, but it happens and you persevere. If you quit over this, you simply aren’t hardcore.

The only reason I am not making an HC char is because of the lagfest we get in the EU servers. I think that this website is focused on US fans/news so the terrible lagfest of EU servers since the game’s release hasn’t been reported accordinly here. The big lagfests in EU stopped somewhere at the start of the month, but we still get some nice lagspikes sometimes in busy hours.

We’re all over. Elly, Rush, and Dorjan are at IncGamers HQ not far from London. I’m in the US, as is Nizarus and HK, while KayDee is in Sweden. If there’s more focus on the US servers in the news it’s because the vast majority of Blizzard official communication and CM stuff is from Irvine, and generally focused on the US server and realms.

A lot of the EU stuff is in a language other than English, and that’s the native tongue of most of us and the readers, though we’re happy to post news from everywhere, when fans point us to interesting news and translations.

I only have about 100 hours and not died to lag, but did come extremely close once. Game stopped responding for a few seconds and when it got back I just had a sliver of red. I fired off (or pressed the keys) for all my survival cooldowns while lagged out so maybe that helped, plus I always build defensively.

In any case, mass lag or not – no server rollback IMO. Lag and bugs are part of the game and will kill you sooner or later.

You just got lucky and probably have a rock solid Internet connection. Eventually, most people WILL lose HC chars to lag… and feel pretty bad about it. Some of them will accept that as part of the game and keep playing, others will be too frustrated by it and stop… like me : I stopped playing online HC about 8 years ago after losing a Javazon to lag. (actually, I stopped HC alogether : I prefer to be the one to decide when to “retire” my character, and losing one when I’m having the most fun with it is really annoying, especially since you often need several hours to reach that point in D2…)

Well, this is one of the many reasons I don’t play hardcore – although its mainly cos I always take unnecessary risks. But I’m SURE most of the hardcore players already knew what they were up against, no? You made the character knowing that “shit happens” and you get killed. Its a lame way to die, but you knew what you were signing up for when you made a hardcore character.

So are people really shocked or is it just that now there are more lvl60 characters being affected? This has been an issue from day 1 and playing with 200+ms latency from aus, HC is out of the question for me.

Sadly I really don’t see what will change to make the problem go away. With so many things that can/do happen with Internet connections, server stability is only one part of the equation. Anyway I’m not saying there should be an offline mode, but everyone needs to accept the fact that online only has its good points and, currently, some very bad ones. And the whole RMAH/DRM situation means Bliz will not be changing their decision.

200+ (but below 300) is really not that bad, barely noticeable in my experience. And for the past few days I’ve had a pretty stable <200. Only yesterday the lag became a game-changer, most of the other time (not counting the first week) I have to say was quite smooth.

I think that a BIG LAG killing maybe thousands of char at once is unheard. As for me, having played HC-D2 for severals years, I’ve never seen this. But maybe you did ? If so, I’ll be very interested if you can share such info with us.

And yes, Blizzard could post a blue somewhere, even if they do nothing for the dead chars. On b.net the thread was already 25 pages long when I last looked at it, the minimum these people, customers, are waiting for Blizzard, would be an explanation of what happens and what they plan to do in the future to prevent it.

Well, network deaths were very, very common in D2 HC, as I’m sure you know. So were deaths related to game bugs, I remember my entire party of 6 or so players wiping to the MSLE bug in Act 2 Hell. Blizzard is not responsible. You may insist that it’s good customer service, but the hardcore mode is a totally optional mode for players willing to take risks.

Just like the game tells you: hardcore is hardcore, they will not restore for ANY reason.

It doesn’t matter if the forum thread you speak of is 10 or 100 pages, Blizzard has no obligation to do anything for the dead chars, or explain the network spike to the players. This is all part of the Terms of Service, and because Blizzard probably has dozens of network partners who provide bandwidth and server allocation, it’s totally infeasible to expect any kind of specifics. All HC players have ALREADY AGREED to such circumstances, as unfortunate as they are. It was true with D2’s competitive online ladder and it’s true with D3’s online-only mode.

The best thing you can do to protect yourself is to LOG OFF if the server is acting up, and cut your losses if you have a lag death.

it’s not all so black-and-white. Back in D2 days, I remember they did HC rollbacks (probably more than once). I remember because I lost my acct due to not logging in for 3 months and it so happened that around that time there was some server problem or something and they rolled back accounts so I got my chars back (needless to say they expired again but I was pretty much done with the game anyway).

EDIT: I should probably not say “HC rollbacks” because I think they also included SC if I remember correctly, but still…rollbacks nevertheless.

If they roll back an entire account, I guess that’s possible, but for the situation here there’s no chance of a rollback, it’s virtually guaranteed. Maybe some network engineers have an internal meeting, and take note of the spike, but I’ve never heard of a rollback specifically for HC death.

man that sucks. I lost a lvl32 HC Barb last week due to my internet connection issues. But I knew I was taking a heavy risk. I had been having occasional moments of 50% packet loss. And sure enough I had one occur right during a pack of mobs. I knew the instant I couldn’t hit anything that I was dead. Funny thing is, I wasn’t even upset.

It ended up that something had nested in the cable box and chewed one of the lines. Cable guy said once there is foil showing on the line, it can act as an antenna for pretty much any wireless signal. Cleaned it out, removed damage line and all is fine again.

That said, I have now noticed since 1.0.2b that there is random spikes. I keep a ping running on google when that happens just to be sure it isn’t me, and so far it hasn’t been. They are very brief spikes tho. At least in HC normal, it was survivable. I want those achievements, but I may have to go to SC for a while until they sort this out.

After loosing two HC characters which I had spent about 80 hours of gameplay due to technical glitches Im sticking with my barb level 53 now on softcover, now This far into the game it kind of makes me wonder how many char I would’ve lost if I insisted on playing hardcore, unfortunately the servers are no stable e enough for me to risk wasting all that time to die stupidly. Looks like my DH will be waiting to be played for a while : (

i NEVER played D2 hardcore because I never wanted the risk. I finally tried it in D3 and I’ll tell you something. It is AMAZING! The thrill of beating anything hard after going “Oh Shit, Oh Shit, Oh SHiiiiiitt!” is just..ya. It’s awesome. I was surprised my first lost char didn’t even bother me much.

As a HC player, I appreciate the news bit. I try to log off at the first sign of lag, but following this tactic too closely would mean never playing on weekends. I think all HC players are aware of this risk, but it’s still a crappy way to die.

My first and only HC death so far is from battle.net 🙁 went donwn a wp and started off, threw some spells with no effect when seeing a monster running on spot. Used all my defensive skills running back toward wp.. 5sec later 3champs were on my corpse..

Having played HC for 7years or so im taking deaths well but being killed by freakin servers sucks.

If they cant fix servers atleast give us save and exit to use when battle.net strikes.